Running HS06

Running the HEPSPEC-06 benchmark

This article describes the steps that were taken to run the HEPSPEC-06 benchmark on the worker nodes at Nikhef. The procedure is in principle described on the CERN wiki and some additional information can be found at EGI. However, some modifications were needed to get the benchmark to run.

Procedure

1. Create the base directory for the test

 SPEC=/tmp/benchmark
 mkdir $SPEC

2. Get the benchmark configuration tarball and extract it in the base directory

 cd $SPEC
 tar xzvf spec2k6-2.13.tar.gz

3. Overwrite runspec.sh with this version of runspec.sh

4. Get the SPEC2006 test suite. If you got an NDPF account, you can get cpu2006.tar.bz2. Extract the file

 tar xjvf /tmp/cpu2006.tar.bz2

5. Prepare a result directory:

 mkdir myresults

6. To run the test, start a screen session and start the benchmark in it:

 screen
 ./runspec.sh -f myresults -a 32 -d "mynode CentOS 5.9 x86_64 HS06"

7. Wait until the test completed (this may take 4 hours or more, depending on the hardware). The results appear in the specfied results directory:

 head myresults/spec2k6-wn-car-019-20130411-111830/system.txt
 SPECall_cpp2006 with 32-bit binaries.
 Description: wn-car CentOS 5.9 x86_64 HS06
 Result: 142.88
 Start time: Thu Apr 11 11:18:30 CEST 2013
 End time:   Thu Apr 11 15:21:38 CEST 2013
 
 Kernel: Linux wn-car-019.farm.nikhef.nl 2.6.18-348.3.1.el5 #1 SMP Mon Mar 11 19:39:25 EDT   2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
 Processors: 12  Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5645  @ 2.40GHz
 Memory: 49447624 kB
 GCC: gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-54)

For this node, the rating is 142.88 for 12 cores.